Mental health conditions not limited to the visibly insane

Mental health conditions not limited to the visibly insane – Health Minister

Oct 27, 2011 News

A victim of a neuro-psychiatric disorder does not necessarily refer to an insane or “mad person” but rather this medical challenge is in fact a disorder that many normal persons are forced to live with everyday.
This notion was recently emphasized by Minister of Health, Dr. Leslie Ramsammy, who said that people can live with this in one form or another. He made reference to substance abuse, depression and mood swings as some of the problematic conditions that many persons face in chronic ways and sometimes in transient ways.
A transient form of neuro-psychiatric disorder is the condition –postpartum depression – that a woman might experience during pregnancy and after childbirth.

Minister of Health, Dr. Leslie Ramsammy

Postpartum depression is also referred to as postnatal depression and is a form of clinical depression which can affect women after childbirth. Studies report prevalence rates among women from between five and 25 per cent but methodological difference among the studies makes the actual prevalence rate unclear.
The condition often occurs in the first few months after childbirth and may last up to several months or even a year. Symptoms could include sadness, fatigue, changes in sleeping and eating patterns, reduced libido, crying episodes, anxiety and irritability.
Given the limited awareness, the Ministry of Health has plans to ensure that persons are fully aware of the disorder, said Minister Ramsammy. “These are things we want to highlight. We want every Guyanese citizen at the workplace and at home, in schools and in our churches to be expert when it comes to being knowledgeable about health and to be able to seek help.”
However, if seeking help is putting the health sector at a disadvantage where “we can’t adequately respond then let that drive the health sector to meet the needs….this is another opportunity to make the Guyanese more aware and demand more and better health,” said the Minister.
In an attempt to fulfill a promise to bolster the mental health capacity of the public health system, eight nurses were up to earlier this year being trained in the area of psychiatry through an initiative undertaken through the collaborative efforts of the Minister of Health and the Dalhousie University and Ministry of Health of Nova Scotia, Canada.
The training, according to Minister Ramsammy, is characterised by a combination of distance learning and in-class supervised sessions. He explained that the nurses are provided with a series of lessons which they are tasked with internalising ahead of lecture sessions.
“Most of the day they are engaged in reading literature provided to them; then they are exposed to lectures via conferencing with the overseas-based tutors.”
In addition they are given an opportunity to gain a hands-on feel of the wards, the Minister revealed, adding that every few months nurses from the Canadian Ministry of Health travel to Guyana to supervise the wards. A team was expected here in March he had revealed.
The training is expected to continue until January at which point the eight nurses will graduate as certified mental health professionals equipped with the relevant skills and knowledge to deliver mental health service.
The first nine months of the programme, according to Minister Ramsammy, is designed to ensure that the nurses are theoretically prepared for the following three months which will entail them operating on a full-time basis on the wards.
As part of their training, too, the nurses are tasked with keeping logs of what they do on a daily basis.
“The nurses have indicated that the training is much more than they had anticipated. The whole process is very innovative and we will continue this even after these nurses would have completed this training programme.
“We are thinking about using this same training model not just for the mental health nurses but for other level of workers as well,” the Minister disclosed.
It was during the latter part of last year that the Minister had said that there are merely four psychiatrists operating locally, an amount he had deemed grossly insufficient to deal with mental health cases arising among the 750,000 odd Guyanese-population.